STARS, COLORFUL CHARACTERS CITED IN RUSSIAN MOB POKER CASE

NEW YORK 
It’s a case teeming with colorful characters: a reputed Russian mob boss once accused in an Olympic scandal, a wealthy art world impresario who hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a woman named Molly Bloom who gained a celebrity following by hosting them at high-stakes poker games.

U.S. authorities allege all had roles in a sprawling scheme by two related Russian-American organized crime enterprises. Prosecutors say in recent years the operations laundered at least $100 million in illegal gambling proceeds through hundreds of bank accounts and shell companies in Cyprus and the United States.

The sprawling case against more than 30 defendants, announced this week by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, illustrates the insatiable appetite for sports betting around the globe — and the enormous potential for illicit profits. The steep rise in wealth among the upper class in the former Soviet Union has driven that potential to new heights, said Mark Galeotti, a Russian organized crime expert at New York University.

“We’re seeing higher-rolling businessmen involved in these types of cases,” Galeotti said. The high rollers’ bookies are left with the problem “of trying to figure out what to do with suitcases full of cash, and that leads to the money laundering,” he added.

The tentacles of the scheme reached into Trump Tower, the high rise on Fifth Avenue where prosecutors say a U.S. ringleader was living in an apartment one floor below Donald Trump’s place. There, he oversaw a network of Internet sites that formed “the world’s largest sports book” catering “almost exclusively to oligarchs living in the Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” prosecutors said. On one of the thousands of conversations intercepted on the defendants’ cellphones, the leader warned a customer who owed money “he should be careful, lest he be tortured or found underground,” a prosecutor said.

The ring paid Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov — already under indictment in a separate U.S. case accusing him of bribing Olympic figure skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City — $20 million in gambling proceeds in a two-month period alone, court papers said. The new indictment naming Tokhtakhounov called him a “vor” — a term roughly translated to “thief-in-law” and comparable to a Mafia godfather. His role, the papers say, was to use his “substantial influence in the criminal underworld to resolve disputes among criminals.”

U.S. investigators following the trans-Atlantic money trail also uncovered a related scheme involving a swank Manhattan art gallery and high-stakes illegal card games in New York City — one played in the Plaza Hotel. The games attracted professional athletes, Hollywood luminaries and business executives, some who ran up debts in the hundreds of thousands.

Authorities didn’t name the players. But press reports linked actors such as DiCaprio and Ben Affleck to the games run in Los Angeles by Bloom. And DiCaprio has been photographed with Hillel “Helly” Nahmad, a friend charged in the case.

A spokesman for both film stars declined to comment on whether they had been cooperating with authorities. Playing poker isn’t a crime, but it’s illegal to profit by promoting it.